A disclaimer in a vendor’s installation guide includes the following sentence:
The instructions and work methods provided within this guide are intended to supplement existing work methods and do not contemplate all possible variations in equipment design and work methods.
Can an inanimate subject (in this case I believe it’s the “guide”) contemplate? Is the use of contemplate correct in the sentence? I read it not as “think deeply” but more like “consider” or “include”.
It's perhaps not the most common verb, but there's nothing wrong here. It's common to assign some cognitive power to documents, statutes, reports, etc. One may say a document "considers", "anticipates", or "ponders" such and such despite not itself having cognitive powers. Documents are usually written by people, who are usually animate.
You can find in legal texts sentences like:
The guidance document contemplates, however, the possibility that if it would facilitate a settlement and the non de minimus PRPs have been cooperative during the settlement process... (Recommendations and Reports By Administrative Conference of the United States, 1992)
Accordingly, when international law contemplates a right and procedural ability for the individual, it is authorizing his state to confer these on him... (Asylum and International Law, S. Prakash Sinha, Springer, 1971)
Thus the sixteen-hour law allows railroad overtime in case of unforeseen emergencies, just as the new law contemplates, when the eight hours expire. (Eight-hour Law Case No. 797 In the Supreme Court of the United States, October Term 1916, 1917)
The law contemplates no concurrence of commoners, no previous surveys and measurements of waste and of tenements with a comparative estimate. (Law magazine and review: a quarterly review of jurisprudence, Volume 4, 1875)
A law is not able to contemplate, but the people who drafted the law hopefully were. (Even if they cannot always write the most lovely English prose.)